SDSU's dilemma: Mountain West or Big East?

San Diego State suddenly finds itself back in the market for a sports conference, barely a year after announcing it would leave the Mountain West next summer for the Big East in football and Big West in everything else.

Technically, nothing has changed; SDSU is still leaving the Mountain West after the current academic year. In reality, everything has.

Boise State, its western partner in the jump to the Big East, announced it is staying in the Mountain West, and even SDSU athletic director Jim Sterk — after months of steadfastly, even stubbornly, saying his school was committed to the Big East — conceded in a statement that the news “represents a significant change in conference alignment.”

So now what? Stay in the Mountain West? Or go it alone into uncharted territory?

Neither choice is particularly enticing, at least compared to what could have been.

Understand that SDSU is a state institution that is largely funded by taxpayer dollars and that wants to play big-time NCAA Division I football. Now mix in a biting recession and some of the nation’s most stringent gender equity guidelines, meaning what limited financial resources are available can’t be poured into football and men’s basketball while ignoring the 16 other teams on campus. SDSU’s athletic department needs money to thrive or even just survive, and the Big East offered it.

All things being equal, SDSU never would have left the Mountain West. But all things haven’t been equal. SDSU, according to school officials, received about $1.4 million last year in Mountain West television revenue and is projected to get $600,000 this year.

Conservative estimates for a new football TV contract in the Big East were $6.4 million per year. To Sterk and SDSU President Elliot Hirshman, it was a no-brainer.

If there is a tragic element to recent developments, it is that neither option facing SDSU likely offers the same revenue potential. And that could have profound repercussions across the athletic department — from assistant coaches in Olympic sports, to football funding, to a new practice facility for the Top 25 men’s basketball team.

But it’s the boat they find themselves in. Here’s a look at some factors in deciding which way to paddle.

The timeline

What once was an open-ended proposition, at least until the Aztecs officially joined the Big East on July 1, suddenly has a looming deadline.

Part of Boise State’s contract to remain in the Mountain West includes a stipulation that the conference must consider SDSU as the 12th football member before anyone else (read: BYU). That clause expires Jan. 31.

The problem: SDSU might not be able to wait for hard numbers on TV contracts to emerge from both conferences, potentially forcing it to make a hasty decision based on speculation and innuendo.

A new Big East TV deal has been delayed several times and might not be finalized for months, or at least until the networks actually know who will be in the conference. The Mountain West has renegotiated its primary TV contract with CBS, allowing the conference to package secondary rights to another network. But we don’t know how much that will be worth, either.

SDSU, certainly, is under no obligation to accept any Mountain West offer by month’s end. If it doesn’t, though, it risks being shut out if the Mountain West then opts for another school (BYU, SMU, Houston, UTEP) and decides — as Commissioner Craig Thompson has indicated — to stand pat at 12. It might not be a game of chicken Sterk and Hirshman want to play right now.

The big question

SDSU must decide how badly it wants the Mountain West. But the Mountain West also must decide how badly it wants SDSU.

The conference is only obligated to give the Aztecs the “right of first option,” but there’s no language saying it can’t slide a lowball offer across the table hoping (or knowing) they’ll say no. Will it help SDSU pay the $1.5 million exit fee from the Big West, as it will with Boise State’s exit fee from the Big East? Will it make concessions to help SDSU keep TV revenue from nonconference basketball games? Does SDSU still forfeit its $2.5 million cut of the Mountain West year-end distribution for 2012-13?

The planned departures of SDSU and Boise State created friction with the rest of the conference, which got worse when SDSU twisted arms in the Big West to find Boise State a home for its other sports. According to one ESPN report, SDSU currently doesn’t have the “votes” from the other members to remain.

The animosity has become petty at times. The Mountain West shipped SDSU to Springfield, Mo., to play Missouri State in the Mountain West-Missouri Valley Challenge. The conference website has rarely highlighted SDSU achievements since the school announced its intention to join the Big East. Despite the Aztecs being the conference’s highest-ranked men's basketball team, they have yet to have a Mountain West player of the week this season (and that includes a week when Chase Tapley scored a career-high 33 points).

At the end of the day, however, this is about money and marketing value, and SDSU might need the Mountain West as much as the Mountain West needs SDSU. The ambivalence about SDSU’s status from both sides is probably more rhetoric than reality, and Sterk and Thompson are said to be speaking daily.

But know this: SDSU is not getting the sweetheart deal Boise State did.

Truth or dare

It’s easy to blame Boise State president Bob Kustra for the current mess, to curse him for using SDSU’s pull with the Big West to ultimately leverage a better deal with the Mountain West while leaving the Aztecs dangling.

Give Kustra this much. He did write into Boise’s deal the stipulation that the Mountain West must consider SDSU first before anyone else.

Again, the conference could simply plug its nose and present the Aztecs an offer it couldn’t possibly accept. But you’d think the conference wouldn’t

want to cross Kustra, its new kingmaker.

So how loyal is Kustra? Does he insist on an amicable offer to the Aztecs? Or does he twist the knife in their back?

The dueling deals

Bottom line: As much as people want to talk about at-large NCAA Tournament berths and travel costs and regional rivalries, this comes down to two numbers.

One is how much a Big East TV contract is worth. The other is how much a Mountain West TV contract is worth.

The Mountain West has been bleeding high-profile members in recent years (BYU, Utah, TCU), and the imminent departures of SDSU and Boise State devalued it even further. The Mountain West felt it had to do something, and it did.

The new deal differs in two fundamental ways. Schools get a $300,000 bonus for each regular-season football game on ESPN, ESPN2, CBS, NBC or Fox, plus another $200,000 if it’s on a Saturday. And the profits from a BCS bowl berth (or its future equivalent) are split 50-50 between the school and conference. The old deal shared TV and bowl revenues evenly across the membership.

That’s great for the Broncos, especially if the Mountain West sells a multiyear package of TV rights to their home football games or if they qualify for a BCS-type bowl. But what does it mean for everyone else in a typical year? It could be as little as $1 million per school; it could be half that. Every extra dollar paid to Boise State is one less for everyone else.

Boise State reportedly made similar demands of the Big East.

“What Boise State wanted was outrageous and unprecedented,” Navy Athletic Director Chet Gladchuk told the Capital Gazette. “It was not palatable to any of the other Big East institutions. In the final analysis, Boise wasn’t worth it … What it tells me is the Mountain West was desperate. Clearly, the Mountain West was willing to make whatever concessions necessary to keep Boise in the fold.”

The Big East, meanwhile, is sticking with the traditional model of equitable revenue distribution. It just doesn’t know how big the pot will be. With the defections mounting, estimates have gone from $10 million per school per year to $6 million to $4 million to something less.

The counter-punch

The Big East is unraveling like a yarn ball under siege from kittens. You think Commissioner Mike Aresco, a CBS Sports exec with deep ties in the industry, is just going to pet them?

The one thing the Big East has that other mid-major football conferences do not is a war chest full of money. What happens if Aresco puts together a lucrative offer and lures BYU from the land of football independence? What if he guarantees $5 million per school per year before finalizing a new TV deal?

There are already indications that Aresco is not playing wallflower, accelerating talks with TV networks for a new contract. He said Wednesday that the Big East “very much wants (San Diego State) to stay.” If he backs words with dollars, it could get interesting.

Travel

This is proffered as an argument to stay in the Mountain West, given the expense of jetting your football team across the country for Big East games.

In fact, the opposite is true. It’s a reason to leave the Mountain West.

The rest of your sports will be in the Big West, with seven schools in Southern California. The women’s tennis team isn’t getting on a plane to Albuquerque or Laramie and spending the night; it’s piling in a van, driving an hour to UC Irvine and returning that night.

SDSU has crunched the numbers. The estimated increase in football travel: $400,000. The estimated savings from being in the Big West: $500,000.

And another thing: Travel in the Big West is immeasurably more convenient and does not involve radical altitude or climate change. It’s an intangible, but it could translate into victories for teams not run ragged by the constant overnight trips into the Rockies.

Basketball

No Aztecs program figures to be more impacted by the decision than Steve Fisher’s, which has been ranked in the Top 25 for the last three seasons and raised the university’s national profile in ways never imagined.

The short answer is that the Mountain West is a better fit for his team, given the stiffer competition, the bigger arenas, the more at-large berths in the NCAA Tournament and their accompanying payouts. Last season the Mountain West finished fifth in conference RPI (ratings percentage index) among 33 Division I conferences. The Big West was 25th.

But it’s more complicated than a few numbers spit out by a computer.

SDSU’s plan was to ramp up its nonconference schedule to compensate for the anticipated RPI hit, and the Big West offers the flexibility to do that. Its basketball TV contract provides the Aztecs with arguably more regional and national exposure (on Fox and ESPN) than in the Mountain West, and it allows them to sell broadcast rights to selected nonconference home games.

The Big West also made a scheduling exception so SDSU could play at Kansas in January next year. And part of the Big East deal facilitates nonconference games against its membership (there have been talks with Memphis, Temple and Cincinnati). Those high-profile games could go away, or greatly diminish, by staying in the Mountain West.

Another Big West plus involves travel. In most years, the Aztecs would get on a plane once from January to mid-March, with the other conference games involving buses and far fewer nights in a hotel.

The endless trips into the mountains? The snow, the dry air, the lung-scorching elevation? The 6 a.m. wake-up calls for the bus to the airport? The weather delays? The missed class time? All that exacts a mental and physical toll, and who knows what a rested Aztecs team might do in March.

Take last year. They closed the season at Boise State, at TCU, then the Mountain West conference tournament in Las Vegas. Three days later, they were on a plane to Columbus, Ohio, for the NCAA Tournament — a team running on fumes.

The great unknown is how a league full of gyms and 250 RPIs impacts recruiting. There were rumblings over the summer that it might, that coveted players were cooling on the specter of the Aztecs in the Big West.

Then they signed 6-foot-6 forward Dakarai Allen, a four-star prospect whose stock is rapidly rising during his senior season at Sacramento’s Sheldon High.

“We don’t really care about that,” said Von Allen, Dakarai’s father. “We don’t get caught up in that. We just wanted my son to go a place where he can grow and thrive.”

Stability

On the surface, it appears the Mountain West is the more secure of the two options as one school after another leaves the Big East or admits it is trying to.

But consider this: The reworked revenue-sharing arrangement could split the conference into a single have and a bunch of have-nots. How long are the New Mexicos and UNLVs going to watch Boise State make three, four, five times as much money each year before they rebel?

Remember, the Mountain West was formed in 1999 as a spinoff from the Western Athletic Conference. Who’s to say a similar power play doesn’t happen again? Or that the ever-shifting sands of conference realignment don’t eventually swallow Mountain West teams like they have in the Big East?

There are also the potential moral issues of joining a conference where the more you win in football, the more money you get, and the more money you get the better chance you have of winning. It creates a temptation to cut corners, to sacrifice your university’s academic integrity at the altar of the almighty dollar. To cheat.

Doesn’t mean it will happen. It does mean that the incentive exists, or at least more than in a conference that divides revenues evenly. History tells us it’s a slippery slope.